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Castration Makes Men Live (Much) Longer

One imagines that telling a eunuch he’ll live 20 years longer is just adding insult to his injury, but in any event this “new” discovery has some people excited. Dr. Julyenne Wong reports for ABC News:

Call it making the best of a potentially bad situation. Eunuchs — castrated men — live nearly 20 years longer than other men, a new study has found.

The study of over 80 eunuchs from the Chosun Dynasty, which ruled in Korea from 1392 to 1897, looked at the world’s only known record of eunuchs’ lives and compared them to genealogical records of other men of similar social rank. The researchers cross-checked their results with other royal records.

They found that the average lifespan of a Korean eunuch was about 70 years, 14 to 19 years higher than non-castrated men of similar social standing.

Three of the 81 eunuchs lived to be over 100 years old. The researchers calculated that the rate of centenarians among this group of eunuchs was at least 130 times higher than the current rate in developed countries.

“Our study supports the idea that male sex hormones decrease the lifespan of men,” wrote Kyung-Jin Min, associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Inha University in Inchon, South Korea, and lead author of the study published today in the journal Current Biology…